“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
John 4: 19-24
There is something that is really puzzling me during this current Coronavirus crisis, and that is the insistence of ordained people that they must be allowed into their church buildings to pray and even to stream services over the internet.
I myself am ordained. I’ve been a Methodist Presbyter for nearly eight years now and I just don’t understand it.
For years we have been quite rightly telling people that the church isn’t the building, it is the people who meet together week by week to receive Holy Communion, to worship God, to pray and to gather in fellowship with each other. The Church, the Body of Christ, is the people, sisters and brothers in Christ who are united as disciples of Jesus.
The church building is just that, a building. Yes, it is a building consecrated for a special purpose, the worship of God and, yes, older church buildings are soaked with prayer and you can feel a sense of the sacred when you enter them; but that doesn’t mean that the Ordained have to go into them for their prayers and to record or stream services for broadcast on the internet.
We can pray to a God anywhere. We can worship God anywhere. We can celebrate Holy Communion anywhere.
That is the message of the verses from John’s gospel above. The woman at the well asked Jesus where the correct place to worship God was. Jesus’ reply was that there was no right or wrong place: it wasn’t a matter of being in a particular place or building but of heart and mind, of worshipping the Father in spirit and in truth.
We don’t need to be in our church buildings at the present time, and those of us who are ordained have no more right to be there than anybody else. If our congregations can’t come into our church buildings to pray and worship why should we enjoy what could be seen as a special privilege that that can’t? I write this on Maundy Thursday, when we remember Jesus taking the role of a servant and washing his disciples feet. How does this servant mentality fit in with the idea of clergy being in church buildings when others can’t?
Our church buildings are important and special to us and I am missing being in all of my five church buildings, but I could not, in all good conscience, go into one of them to pray or worship when I know that those God has called me to serve cannot?
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